


Watching for flight

by piggy09



Series: Obscure Word Fics [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Dream Bubbles, Gen, Yeah I know ancestors don't end up in the dream bubbles shh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-26
Updated: 2014-01-26
Packaged: 2018-01-10 02:19:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1153607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After an endless, dreamy amount of time, enough to tell at least eight of her greatest adventures to the uncaring ocean, the sky bulges over her head and spits out a figure decked in orange. Mindfang watches with a keen, predatory interest as the troll (because of course what else could it be?) plummets towards the ocean and then somehow rights itself, spreading wings in a glittering blue.</p>
<p><em>Oh</em>, thinks Mindfang, her interest sharpening. <em>This is </em>new.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Watching for flight

**Author's Note:**

> From a prompt on Tumblr:  
> "Vriska & Mindfang | Dystopia: an imaginary place of total misery. A metaphor for hell."

The wood of the ship creaks under her boots, the sound a piercing counterpoint to the hushed noise of the waves. Besides that: silence surrounding Mindfang in a wide arc. She paces up and down the ship to fill the air, to keep the sound that is not a sound from unnerving her completely.

She doesn’t know how long she’s been here. The sky never changes – it is always night, cloudy. She is unable to track her position from the cloud cover and no matter how she spins the ship there is no land in sight. There are no other vessels on the water. She hasn’t gotten tired, or hungry, or thirsty.

She remembers how she died. So…what is this?

After an endless, dreamy amount of time, enough to tell at least eight of her greatest adventures to the uncaring ocean, the sky bulges over her head and spits out a figure decked in orange. Mindfang watches with a keen, predatory interest as the troll (because of course what else could it be?) plummets towards the ocean and then somehow rights itself, spreading wings in a glittering blue.

_Oh,_ thinks Mindfang, her interest sharpening. _This is_ new.

The troll appears to have seen her and makes its erratic way towards her ship, finally alighting on the deck.

Two sets of blank white eyes meet each other from two faces engulfed in identical manes of hair.

“Well,” says Mindfang softly, in a voice that creaks like the deck. “What have we here, little spider?”

The wriggler’s eyes widen and with a flicker that seems unconscious Mindfang is mirrored by a cheaper copy of her own outfit, the coat hand-sewn with careful and uneven stitches. Her wings have vanished, somehow.  “You’re the Marquise,” she breathes, voice tinged with awe. Mindfang feels a bit of her old bravado settle around her shoulders like a cape.

“Yes, of course,” she says, her voice round and deep. “Now how do we get _out?_ ”

* * *

…They can’t actually get out. Wriggler Mindfang (“Vriska!” she says, blushing cerulean to the tips of her cheekbones) says that of _course_ you can leave, it’s like this, easy! and she concentrates. The sky ripples as if it’s been struck, but neither of them move.

“……..Huh!” she says.

She narrows her eyes at the sky, contemplative, but nothing happens.

Her shoulders slump. “That usually works,” she mutters.

Mindfang looks at her for a beat, her smaller self wrapped in a bootleg coat, and sighs.

“You might as well spin us a tale while we’re trapped here, Vriska,” she says, sitting with poise against the mast. “You appear to associate my name with great deeds,” (as she should!) “but I have nothing to put to your name except your inexplicable faith in our escape. So?”

Vriska scurries over to her and perches with far less elegance, her limbs sprawled out everywhere. She opens her mouth, pauses, and then spins a tale with as many strands and twists as any of her lusus’ webs (sweeps and sweeps ago, that was).

She gets to the point of her confrontation with her own Redglare on the roof, and then pauses and licks her lips. “And that’s how I died!” she says cheerily, voice cracking. The two ghosts sit there for a while, contemplating each other.

“It appears we’ve both made plenty of mistakes, then,” Mindfang says dryly. “How sad that even after all this time our blood will lead us to the same fate.” She pronounces the _8_ with a certain crispness, assuming correctly that her descendent (her _descendent_ ) will appreciate it. She grins, the cockiness of her mouth not yet tempered with time. Mindfang could have taught her a lot, probably, were she not already dead. An arm cut short at the shoulder, abruptly devoid of purpose.

Vriska sighs, suddenly and mercurially irritable. She rests her head against the side of the ship and looks at the sky above. “Who knows,” she says with false brightness, “maybe the rest of my team of idiots have pulled themselves together by now!”

She turns and looks at Mindfang. Her eyes gleam in the dark. “Maybe we’ll both get out of here soon,” she continues, brightening, “and—”

With an audible splintering sound, a crack opens in the sky overhead. Vriska’s eyes widen and with a _snap_ her wings have extended, instinctual, from her back. “Shit,” she breathes, “he’s here!”

Mindfang is on her feet in an instant, hands itching for dice that are no longer there. “Who?” she asks urgently. “What enemy approaches, Vriska Serket?”

She watches the girl gulp. “He’s – he’s – huge,” she says, words tripping over themselves, “and invincible, probably, and he’s trying to kill all of us, and there’s nothing we can do but _run_.”

At the last word she is already hovering above the ground, leaking sparkling dust, and looking at her ancestor. Her eyes widen as she realizes Mindfang’s lack of wings, but before she can say anything the sky cracks wider. Out above the cloud cover is void and void and void.

“Go,” Mindfang says, standing tall and strong and proud. When Vriska pauses, she says it again, louder: “ _Go._ My fate is already sealed, child, with wax older than you. There’s nothing left for me.”

She pauses. “You are the best thing I’ve ever made,” she says, softer now. “Go gather up the wretched remains of your team and show them what you can really do.”

Vriska looks at her for a heartbeat neither of them possess. Blue glints at the corner of her eyes. She breathes in sharply through her nose, looks at Mindfang, and takes off. She is beautiful, flying, soaring through the crack in the sky-that-is-not-a-sky, flying off to some other afterlife.

Everything is splintering, now, falling to pieces. Rubble. Mindfang settles herself back on the deck, still the queen of the ocean after all this time. She looks around her and smiles.

“One more story,” she says, loud enough to drown the sound of her world falling apart. “One more, and then I’ll go.”

“Once upon a time,” Marquise Spinneret Mindfang says, loud and grand, “there was a girl named Vriska Serket…”

**Author's Note:**

> We are  
> Let me stop for a second  
> Held heart  
> Only beats in the evening  
> Low tide  
> Watching for flight  
> \--"We Sink," CHVRCHES


End file.
